Juno Profile: Hannah Georgas

Leah Collins, Dose.ca03.18.2011

New Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year nominee Hannah Georgas says her Juno nods are an honour because she's been writing songs since she was little. "Like, six little." The singer-songwriter reflects on her nominated songs and the good things she's got planned for This is Good's follow-up.Vanessa Heins/Hidden Pony
/ Vanessa Heins/Hidden Pony

This is Good is the 2010 debut album from Vancouver singer-songwriter Hannah Georgas.Hidden Pony
/ Hidden Pony

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She’s up for New Artist of the Year at the 2011 Juno Awards, but it’s Hannah Georgas’ other nomination, for Songwriter of the Year, that comes up first when she calls.

“It’s a huge honour, and songwriting, for me, is key,” Georgas says. “It’s a huge part of who I am and I take that really seriously. I’ve been writing songs since I was little.

“Like, six little.”

Who hasn’t played make-believe rock star at some point, though? Give a kid a keyboard, and they’ll bang on it -- without going on to release an album (2010’s This is Good), collect some trophies (a Verge Award, an Indie, a CBC Radio 3 Bucky) and have critics, and Taylor Swift, breathlessly swooning over their dulcet pop-rock.

Georgas, though -- she says she was hooked on songwriting by an early age. OK -- maybe her compositions at six weren’t serious, but the feeling she got plunking at the keys definitely was.

“My mom put me in piano lessons when I was five, so as soon as I figured that out, I was singing and beginning to write my own songs,” says Georgas, who was raised in the Toronto suburbs. (She’s called Vancouver home since launching her solo music career in the latter half of the 2000s.) “I guess I was serious in the sense it made me feel empowered and excited. And that’s how I feel, even now, every time I finish a song or writing a song. There’s no other feeling like it. … And when you have a song that just comes to you out of nowhere and it takes an hour or whatever to write, that’s just the most amazing feeling in the world.”

In the songwriting category, three of the compositions off Georgas’ April 2010 debut This is Good are being honoured. There’s the album opener, “Chit Chat” -- a jittering pop-rock jam that sees the 20-something chewing out a conversation-hogging pal while also showcasing her vocals; marble-mouthed and cooing at the outset, she’s lashing out with a rock-chick snarl by the end. Also included is the jangling but contemplative “The Deep End.” And then there’s the lilting “Lover’s Breakdown,” the song Georgas says was quickest to write -- or, rather, the one that most seemed to come out of nowhere.

“For ‘Lovers Breakdown’ I was in this relationship and we were breaking up every other week and getting back together,” Georgas says of the song’s origin story. “It was at that one rocky point in the relationship, and the song just poured out of me.

“I remember just crying while I was writing it, and it just came pouring out of my heart, and it came so fast,” she enthuses, explaining that she captured the song the same way she writes most of her work: at home, alone, on an acoustic guitar.

The album recording of the song captures a relatively restrained Georgas -- more wistful than weepy, as she sings about how she can’t help “crawling back” to the object of her affection.

“All of my songs are very personal songs for me, and are about something that’s affected me in my life,” she says. And while they might be out there for anyone to hear, the singer-songwriter says she doesn’t go out of her way to share her songs with the people who inspired them. She made an exception, though, for the guy behind “Lovers Breakdown.”

“With that particular person, yeah, I did. It was pretty funny,” she says with a peal of giggles. “Like I said, that was just a funny relationship. We broke up and got back together again all the time, and it was so dramatic and crazy. We were back together, and I played him the new song,” she says.

His response? “He was like, ‘Is everything OK?’

“And I was like, ‘Yeah, uh, no!’ Obviously not,” she laughs.

And obviously they’re not together any longer.

Georgas has been spilling other experiences into songs these days -- though she expects it won’t be until sometime in 2012 that fans hear anything of what she’s been going through. Following her commitments for Toronto’s Juno Week -- which include appearances at a free Juno Block Party concert March 24 with City and Colour and Shad and a March 26 performance with fellow New Artist of the Year nominee Meaghan Smith -- she says she plans to finish the process of writing and demo-ing she’s already begun, with the aim to enter the studio by the fall.

“It’s still in its baby stages,” says Georgas of This is Good’s follow-up. That said, there is one aspect of her next album she’s ready to reveal. “In terms of the production, I’m thinking of going in a bit of a different way, having a little more electronic elements to it -- electronic-y, dirty sounds.”

This is Good album track, “Dancefloor” had Georgas playing with a brash, disco-rock palette, and she says that her trajectory for album No. 2 is “kind of in that realm.”

“I’m really into electronic stuff and ‘90s and ‘80s music a lot, it’s just always influenced me,” she says of her points of inspiration. “[The album] is not as hardcore as ‘Dancefloor,’ but there’s going to be some elements of that, for sure.”

Hannah Georgas is nominated for New Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year at the 40th Annual Juno Awards. For more on this year’s New Artist of the Year nominees, check back to www.dose.ca/junos throughout the week.

The 40th Annual Juno Awards will be broadcast live from Toronto on CTV Sunday, March 27.

Hannah Georgas’ Canadian Tour Dates Include:

Toronto, March 24 (Juno Block Party with City and Colour and Shad)

Toronto, March 26

Victoria, April 9

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